Many service and repair suppliers employ a fleet of vehicles to service their customers. These vehicles, which may be automobiles regularly driven by the service personnel or trucks supplied by the employers, generally carry a so-called “trunk inventory” in the vehicle. These trunk inventories typically consist of frequently used spare parts such as PC boards, components, and kits for maintenance purposes as well as supplies which must be delivered to the serviced accounts. Each service technician will typically engage in multiple physical transactions a day involving either dispensing parts or replenishing parts in her trunk inventory, in connection with installing parts, trading parts in the field with other technicians, and replenishing the inventory from the enterprise central storage.
The value of any trunk inventory will vary depending upon the nature of the service business, but assuming a typical technician requires at least $3,000-$5,000 in parts and supplies, with a service operation of a typical dealership having at least a dozen technicians in the field, they could easily have $500,000 in trunk inventory. The multiple transactions involving the trunk inventories make it difficult to record the transactions properly, making billing and inventory reconciliation difficult.